Dumb Remarks by Scientists that Pseudoscientists Love

Read any site espousing some crank idea, whether creationism, geocentrism, or
conspiracy theories, and you have a good chance of seeing some quote from a
famous scientist. Lots of times the quotes are taken out of context, but in many
other cases it's undeniable that the quote is just plain dumb. In some
cases the scientists are blissfully unaware there are charlatans looking for
scientific quotes to lend authority to their ideas; in other cases they seem to
fancy themselves deep thinkers and unsung philosophers.

D. M. S. Watson

Probably no passages in all of science have been as widely quoted by
creationists as these by British zoologist D. M. S. Watson in the August 10, 1929 issue of Nature
(p.231 - 234).

the theory of evolution itself, a theory universally accepted not because
it be can proved by logically coherent evidence to be true but because the
only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.

Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists not because it has been
observed to occur or is supported by logically coherent arguments, but
because it does fit all the facts of taxonomy, of paleontology, and
geographical distribution, and because no alternative explanation is
credible.

Watson deserves a posthumous Ig Nobel Prize for doing more than any other
mainstream scientist to advance creationism. Even allowing for the fact that
this was written in 1929, it's scientifically illiterate. Even by 1929,
evolution was supported by "logically coherent arguments" like the fossil record,
the existence of a number of intermediate forms between major groups, and cases
of natural selection being observed in nature. Special creation, on the other
hand, has never been observed, and fails to account for why organisms increase
in complexity through geologic time, or why bats' wings, dolphins' flippers, and
human hands are all variations on a common structural plan. Furthermore, if
special creation were the case, we might expect to find creatures with
structures utterly unrelated to any other organism. Why don't some butterflies
have metal or plastic wings? Why are there no organisms with wheels? Why don't we have
organisms that can live actively (as opposed to surviving as spores) in space?
Why are there no silicon-based life forms? Why are there any
fossil organisms different from existing ones? Indeed, why did any organisms
ever go extinct - if the world was created not long ago, why aren't all
originally created life forms still here?So not only is evolution
supported by observation, but special creation is never observed, and furthermore,
we fail to find evidence that could reasonably be expected if special creation
had happened.

What in the world was Watson thinking when he wrote this article, even by the
standards of 1929? We get an inkling from this passage:

Thus the present position of zoology is unsatisfactory. We know as surely
as we shall that evolution has occurred; [a passage that seems mysteriously
not to get quoted by people who like to cite Watson] but we do not know how this
evolution has been brought about. The data which we have accumulated are
inadequate, not in quantity but in their character, to allow us to determine
which, if any, of the proposed explanations is a vera causa. But it appears
that the experimental method rightly used will in the end give us, if not
the solution of our problem, at least the power of analysing it and
isolating the various factors which enter into it.

Watson was primarily concerned with explaining specifically how evolution took place.
His point was that, although we know that evolution took place, we don't
have direct physical evidence of specifically how. For example Watson
pointed out that we have no real physical evidence that an alleged maladaption
was ever the specific cause of death of an organism. While true, it's also an
unrealistic expectation. First of all, slight differences in adaptation would
probably only show up statistically as slight differences in survival or
reproductive success. Second, I can give you the cause of death of just about
every organism: predation. Cause of death is irrelevant if the successful
adaptation has led to increased reproduction. Regardless how successful the
organism is, sooner or later age or injury will make it just as vulnerable to
predation as a less successful one. Predation only counts if it happens before
the organism has a chance to reproduce, and even well adapted organisms will
occasionally be very unlucky. Finally, an organism who fell prey to
predation would be quite unlikely to leave physical evidence.

Unfortunately, Watson chose language that has been immensely useful to people who
want to demolish science. Watson's central fallacy is one that has also been
immensely useful to creationists: limiting the concept of "proof" in science to
"experiment." Experimentation works fine in laboratory sciences but overgeneralizing it to all of science gives carte blanche to people who
want to attack historical or field sciences.

Science and Truth

NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), a
British organization, polled 250 prominent scientists and science writers on the
one thing about science they would most like people to know. Paul Davies, an
Australian scientist, replied:

The essence of the scientific method is that there is an actually
existing world out there, which is ordered in an intelligible way. The job
of the scientist is to describe that order, in the best possible manner.

Hear, hear! as the British like to say. But alas, Davies goes on to say:

Science is not about right and wrong, about truth, or even about reality.
It is about providing reliable descriptions of the world that enable us to
make new discoveries.

How can science be about describing an "actually existing world" that is
"ordered in an intelligible way," and not be about right and wrong,
truth, or reality? Davies isn't being singled out for special scorn here, he's
quoted because he provides a succinct statement, but alas, the philosophy of
scientists (as opposed to philosophy of science, which is mostly the work of
scientifically illiterate philosophers) is filled with this sort of
psychobabble. Fortunately, not all scientists buy it. Geneticist Sir John E
Sulston said in the same poll:

I should teach the world about evolution - as truth, insofar as we can
comprehend it at the moment;

Science writer Tracey Brown said:

I should teach the world that science is driven by truth, and is accountable
to reality. Quite simply, if you try to build a machine based upon a faulty
premise, it does not work.

At a time when scientific endeavour is often treated to the same suspicion
and scorn as politics and commerce, we should recognise that scientists expose
themselves to this ultimate accountability. They are prepared to be knocked
back, by the hard realities of how the natural world works, and by new ideas and
insights. Isn't that something to be celebrated?

Science writing is rife with the "science doesn't find truth" canard. Some
writers reserve "truth" for ideas that are certain in an absolute sense. This
usage reserves a commonplace word for something that can never be achieved in
practice while simultaneously depriving us of a word for ideas that are so well
founded that, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould, "that it would be perverse to
withhold provisional assent." Furthermore, this usage has played straight into
the hands of pseudoscientists and cranks of every kind. I have not seen the
slightest evidence it has improved scientific literacy, and a great deal of
evidence that it erodes scientific literacy.

The Richard Dawkins Wing

If we ever build a museum to the "warfare model" of science and religion,
Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins merits an entire wing. I doubt if any single
person in science has done more to alienate religious believers from science.
Dawkins answered the NESTA poll above with:

The scientific principle that I wish everyone understood is Darwinian natural
selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as the only known explanation of
'design'.

The world is divided into things that look designed, like birds and
airliners; and things that do not look designed, like rocks and mountains.
Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed, like
submarines and tin openers; and those that are not really designed, like sharks
and hedgehogs. The diagnostic feature of things that look designed is that they
are statistically improbable in the functional direction. They do something
useful - for instance, they fly. Darwinian natural selection, although it
involves no true design at all, can produce an uncanny simulacrum of true
design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was
the more aerodynamically elegant.

Note here the grand circularity: Dawkins asserts by fiat that sharks and
hedgehogs are not designed, and since there is no design in nature, therefore
natural selection is not a design process.

Not only can natural selection mimic design; it is the only known natural
process that can mimic design. And now, here is the most difficult thing
that I wish people understood. True design can never be an ultimate
explanation for anything, because the designer himself is left unexplained.
Designers are statistically improbable things, and trying to explain them as
made by prior designers is ultimately futile, because it leads to an
infinite regress.

For openers, so what if there's an infinite regress? If you explain each
designer by a higher order designer, so what? Why can't the universe be
organized this way? What proof do we have, anywhere, that an infinite regress is
not possible?

More to the point, science accounts for observations by laws, and accounts
for those laws by higher laws. Magnets have poles, like poles repel and unlike
poles attract. We account for magnetism through Maxwell's Equations, which tie
electricity and magnetism together. More recently electromagnetism and the weak
nuclear force have been successfully interpreted in terms of a more complex law.

There are only two possible end states of this process. We either keep on
finding higher level laws in an infinite regress, or the process stops
someplace. When (if) that happens, we will have laws that exist for their own sake,
that have no explanation other than themselves. The multiverse, the hypothesis
that the universe consists of
an infinite number of universes all with their own physical laws, confronts us
with both problems. We will end up
saying that our universe just happened to get laws that enable life to evolve
(the laws just exist with no higher justification), and then we will still have
the problem of explaining why other universes keep getting spawned. Again, we'll
either end up with an infinite regress, or things that just are with no
higher explanation. If we try to evade the issue by postulating a network or
ring of interlocking laws at the base of everything, we will still have to
explain why that network of those laws. Either there are higher
explanations, or something that just is.

Effectively Dawkins postulates that natural selection just is, without
having any deeper cause. Why should natural selection work? Why should
it mimic design? Why should it produce order at all? How can any natural
random mechanism favor statistical improbability? Why didn't selection result in organisms capable of resisting
selection? Why didn't it (shades of Lamarck) produce organisms capable of
changing their own genes in response to change? Since most religions postulate deities
that are self-explaining, that is, they just are, Dawkins really doesn't
come up with any logical improvement. Instead of a deity that just is, Dawkins
invokes natural selection that just is.

Dawkins appears to take pride in a total ignorance of theology. At least the
late Carl Sagan thought of this issue.

If we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude
that the universe has always existed? (Cosmos, Ch. 10)

I have never followed the logic of theologians who say the universe could not
be infinitely old. I don't see the slightest reason why any creator couldn't
have created the universe infinitely long ago (obviously our piece of it began
expanding about 13 b.y. ago). But Sagan's argument implies that
things exist for their utility in supporting theories. Things exist because they
are; theories exist because of
their utility in explaining things. In theology, God doesn't exist to explain
observations, he simply exists.

Natural selection escapes the infinite regress, because it starts simple, and
works up gradually - step by step - to statistical improbability, and the
illusion of design. Engineers and other designers are ultimately made, like all
living things, by natural selection.

So distant are many people from understanding this, they seriously believe
that the existence of functional improbability is evidence in favour of
intelligent design - the greater the improbability, the stronger the evidence.
Truly, the precise opposite is the case. I wish that more people understood
this.

The Air Force likes to say "What you don't know won't hurt you, it will kill
you," and Dawkins' utter ignorance of religion causes him to say things that
are, bluntly, stupid from both scientific and theological perspectives. If
something appears to be designed, one viable explanation is always that it
was designed. Dawkins fails to distinguish between concepts of Design that
see the design in the fundamental laws of nature, versus naive interpretations
put forth with the covert agenda of advancing biblical literalism. He probably
fails to make this distinction because he knows so little about religion he's
not even aware the distinction exists.

The Fred Hoyle Wing

Fred Hoyle is a famous British astronomer, popularizer of science, and
science fiction author, celebrated in science for some brilliantly astute
guesses about nuclear reactions in stars. Against that record are some abysmally
bad guesses, notably the Steady State Theory (Hoyle coined the term "Big Bang"
in derision of the idea that the Universe expanded from a small source),
panspermia, the idea that life arrived on earth from outer space, and the claim
that the fossil Archaeopteryx was a fake. The latter two ideas were
cheerfully adopted by creationists. Creationists have no particular love for
panspermia but they found it expedient to argue that a leading astronomer agreed
that abiotic evolution could not have happened on earth. In any museum of bad
quotes that play straight into the hands of cranks, he also merits an entire
wing.

We know that the difference between a heliocentric theory and a
geocentric theory is one of relative motion only, and that such a difference
has no physical significance (Hoyle, F., 1975. Astronomy and Cosmology - A
Modern Course. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.)

Modern-day geocentrists delight in these quotes. And from a physical
standpoint, they're rubbish. For example, in a geocentric model, we have to
explain how the sun, which is vastly larger than the earth, circles the earth.
In the heliocentric model, there's a point about a million miles from earth
where an object can remain fixed with respect to both bodies. It's not a
theoretical abstraction - spacecraft have been placed there. They need a little
fuel to maintain a stable orbit because of the gravitational effects of the moon
and other planets, but beyond that, they remain in place. In a geocentric model
the spacecraft just hang there, neither falling toward earth nor into the sun.
Why is that? The difference does have physical significance, and the
Ptolemaic theory is wrong in a "meaningful physical sense."

No Such Thing as Pseudoscience?

David Rothman, professor of history and of social medicine and director of
Columbia's Center for the Study of Science and Medicine, as quoted by Robert
MacDougall in Strange enthusiasms: a brief history of American pseudoscience.

It's a retrospective judgment on the losers. It renders those who pass
the verdict smug.

The thing that strikes me about quotes like this is the complete absence of
any indication that content matters, that the "losers" lost not because
they were unlucky but simply because the facts were not on their side. Rothman
used phrenology as an example of an idea once taken seriously but now dismissed
as pseudoscience.

Phrenology was the idea that personal traits could be deduced from the shape
of a person's skull, on the theory that certain portions of the brain would be
associated with specific personality traits and the shape of the skull would
reveal which portions were especially well or poorly developed.

We know now it doesn't work. Personality traits are not so highly localized
in the brain. There is some localization because brain injuries to specific
areas can cause predictable personality changes, but the localization is not so
specific that it shows up in gross brain morphology. Also brain studies using
modern imaging techniques routinely show that certain mental activities trigger
responses in specific areas of the brain. But anyone who tried to revive
phrenology today in its 19th century form would be a pseudoscientist. And if you
don't think it has adherents today, spend a few moments browsing the Web.

But in the mid 19th century, it was not pseudoscience. In the absence
of any real information on brain functions, it was not at all unreasonable to
suspect that different mental traits might be localized in the brain and clues
to them might be manifested in skull morphology. The three main criticisms of
phrenology we can make are:

Its alleged data must have been largely based on spurious patterns,
anecdotal evidence, confirmatory bias or a priori assumptions about
the brain. How else explain that minutely differentiated shades of behavior
were traced to areas a few centimeters across, entirely without any sort of
internal observation of brain function?

It was hopelessly premature for the public attention it received. At
best phrenology would have been an interesting working hypothesis; it
certainly never justified the elaborate charts it eventually employed, or
people having charts of their skulls made, mostly to justify their lofty
opinions of themselves. It would be about like people drawing detailed maps
of newly discovered planets around other stars.

Despite claims made by some modern apologists for phrenology, modern
studies of localized brain functions owe nothing to phrenology. Apart
from a vague notion that some brain functions might be localized, phrenology
failed to rigorously predict any modern findings of neuroscience.

Since the heyday of phrenology, we've learned a lot more about how science
should work. A theory that drew wide public interest despite being based on
scanty evidence and shaky suppositions would be justly labeled pseudoscience
today. The fact that phrenology wasn't pseudoscience in the 19th century
wouldn't legitimize a comparably unsupported theory today.